In my case, it ended up that the swift cluster wasn't 100% configured correctly (forget the details, but the ports/services/ip addresses in the ring and in the actual deployment didn't agree).
So a) check that.

another approach that helped was to remove swauth from the proxy config, and exercise the cluster using curl (see http://docs.openstack.org/cactus/openstack-object-storage/developer/content/ch_object-storage-dev-troubleshooting.html (http://docs.openstack.org/cactus/open...) )

Once I was able to reliably create accounts containers and files, I turned authentication back on, and things seemed much happier.

Hi there, thanks for your input. I tried to upload a storage object after having disabled swauth. I played with the system a bit and everything seemed fine. Then I put swauth back but still same result...I couldn't create/deleet account etc.

Sorry for resurrecting a very old issue, but I experienced precisely the same issue on a fresh deployment of Swift 1.7.4 (where tempauth and upload/download operations were working prior to plugging in swauth).

The initial requests to create the account were failing as the request body was not being set due to a change in webob 1.2.

I was able to resolve by downgrading webob from 1.2.x down to 1.1.1 via pip install -Iv webob==1.1.1.